Thursday, September 20, 2007

Grateful to insightful commentor!

The post "How odd he is" generated more than my usual number of comments. Since I love comments I want to thank you all.

Many of you have had interesting thoughts. I'm definitely following up on your suggestions that Frankie be assessed for OT/PT (and speech therapy) services. Thank you for mentioning; I can't think why it didn't occur to me. It should have.

I particularly want to thank Elise said something I think is very insightful:

But unlike real life, no matter how bad he is at the game, he continually gets
to start fresh with a new character. Until he develops awareness that his
behavior needs to change in order the get a different outcome the result will
always be the same. I bet if he had to play the same character every time he
would lose interest very quickly.

And I think this might be exactly right. One of the things that he might like best about the game is that he gets to continually start over as a new person.

How seldom do we get that chance in real life! When I went away to college someone pointed that out to me. I was going far away, where no one knew me. I could change my style of clothing, change anything about me that I wanted and everybody would just accept it as who I was. I don't think I made any huge changes in anything, but the idea of a total fresh start was very appealing.

And Frankie gets to do that over and over. Whatever happens when he plays his ninety minutes* of game time, he gets to sit down with the manual and plan out who he will be next. Will he be a tall and graceful spell-casting woman from the Alliance? Or a strong, burly troll warrior woman from the Horde? I heard him telling the boys last night that he though next time he might be a boy -- so that he could join them.

They responded of course they way they always do. If he sticks with a character until it gets to level 10 they will help him.

But I don't know if he will.

The seduction of starting over, of being someone new anytime you want to be, even I can see the attraction in that.

___
*I told his babysitter recently that he got 90 minutes of play time and he responded with outrage. "Uh huh! I get an hour and a half!"

2 comments:

  1. I started over once when I started at a new high school. I changed my hair, clothes, etc.... It was great because I wasn't constrained by others perceptions of where I had come from. We've done it as a couple, although unintentionally, when we moved to SF from the South.

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  2. I started over when I went off to college. I purpsefully chose a school a long way from home where I wouldn't know anyone. I didn't make drastic changes, but I did force myself to be more outgoing. I felt like I had been changing some internally in high school, but other people couldn't see it - their vision of me was fixed.

    I can see why it might be appealing to Frankie to start over, though at some point he needs to stick with one character to get anywhere. Hopefully he'll see that at some point - or move on to other games.

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